low power, always on system.. HELP!!
o.k., here's the deal....I have had computers in my cars for years, since the first one: a 486 with a point of sale 10" tube monitor in a 83 caddy coupe.....,
I have had a lot of sucess with panasonic toughbooks butchered & installed, as well as desktop motherboards run off of inverters through the years, not to mention all of the R&D that goes into these sort of things....
I now have a p4 shuttle board & an opus 150, but it's power hungry & will take a lot of tricks to power up the rest of my add ons since the opus is on the edge power wise.
I've been thinking about scrapping the p4 all togeather & going with a board that has much lower power requirements.
I've been thinking about the via mini itx & the side benifit would be that I can also scrap the 8" lilli (way to dim) & add a lcd through the "lvds" interface this board offers.
My question is to anyone who uses a low powered board or has experience with them, if it is possible to have the system on all the time & just shut down the lcd & drives, but not actually go into suspend, & stay connected wirelessly to my network at home or work.....
my main goal here is to be able to comunicate with the vehicle at any time, & have it be online always. I can provide a dedicated battery for a tank circuit/reserve, & I would ideally like to be able to park the car for up to 3 days without the pc running out of juice....or one full day with a few spin ups & comunications through video feeds or up/down loads throughout the day....
my other option was trying to do this with a laptop.....maybe a centrino or something else low powered & connected to a full size gel cell, that should run for a few days at least I would think... & that would also leave me stuck with the lilli for now, but I can then take the opus out all togeather.....
I'm not looking to do this as cheap as possible, rather as good as possible, & will not mind spending whatever it would take for this project....
I'll sacrifice a little processing power for this, but don't want to go below say a 1.2mgz processor......
any thoughts........................
|
Linear Mode
